1. The background
and significance of the Second Vatican Council’s declarations on Mariology

THE
question of the significance of Marian doctrine and piety cannot disregard the
historical situation of the Church in which the question arises. We can
understand and respond correctly to the profound crisis of post-Conciliar Marian
doctrine and devotion only if we see this crisis in the context of the larger
development of which it is a part. Now, we can say that two major spiritual
movements defined the period stretching from the end of the First World War to
the Second Vatican Council, two movements that had—albeit in very different
ways—certain “charismatic features.” On the one side, there was a Marian
movement that could claim charismatic roots in La Salette, Lourdes, and Fatima.
It had steadily grown in vigor since the Marian apparitions of the mid-1800s. By
the time it reached its peak under Pius XII, its
influence had spread throughout the whole Church. On the other side, the
inter-war years had seen the development of the liturgical movement, especially
in Germany, the origins of which can be traced to the renewal of Benedictine
monasticism emanating from Solesmes, as well as to the Eucharistic inspiration
of Pius X. Against the background of the Youth Movement, it gained—in Central
Europe, at least—an increasingly wider influence throughout the Church at large.
The ecumenical and biblical movements quickly joined with it to form a single
mighty stream. Its fundamental goal—the renewal of the Church from the sources
of Scripture and the primitive form of the Church’s prayer—likewise received its
first official confirmation under Pius XII, in his encyclicals on the Church and
on the liturgy.[1]

As these movements
increasingly influenced the universal Church, the problem of their mutual
relationship also came increasingly to the fore. In many respects, they seemed
to embody opposing attitudes and theological orientations. The liturgical
movement tended to characterize its own piety as “objective” and sacramental, to
which the strong emphasis on the subjective and personal in the Marian movement
offered a striking contrast. The liturgical movement stressed the theocentric
character of Christian prayer, which is addressed “through Christ to the
Father”; the Marian movement, with its slogan per Mariam ad Jesum
[through Mary to Jesus], seemed characterized by a different idea of mediation,
by a kind of lingering with Jesus and Mary that pushed the classical Trinitarian
reference into the background. The liturgical movement sought a piety governed
strictly by the measure of the Bible or, at the most, of the ancient Church; the
Marian piety that responded to the modern apparitions of the Mother of God was
much more heavily influenced by traditions stemming from the Middle Ages and
modernity. It reflected another style of thought and feeling.[2]
The Marian movement doubtless carried with it certain risks that threatened its
own basic core (which was healthy) and even made it appear dubious to passionate
champions of the other school of thought.[3]

In any case, a
Council held at that time could hardly avoid the task of working out the correct
relationship between these two divergent movements and of bringing them into a
fruitful unity— without simply eliminating their tension. In fact, we can
understand correctly the struggles that marked the first half of the Council—the
disputes surrounding the Constitution on the Liturgy, the doctrine of the
Church, and the right integration of Mariology into ecclesiology, the debate
about Revelation, Scripture, Tradition and ecumenism—only in light of the
tension between these two forces. All the debates that we have just mentioned
turned—even when there was no explicit awareness of this fact—on the struggle to
hammer out the right relationship between the two charismatic currents that
were, so to say, the domestic “signs of the times” for the Church. The
elaboration of the Pastoral Constitution would then provide the occasion for
dealing with the “signs of the times” pressing upon the Church from outside. In
this drama the famous vote of 29 October 1963 marked an intellectual watershed.
The question at issue was whether to present Mariology in a separate text or to
incorporate it into the Constitution on the Church. In other words, the Fathers
had to decide the weight and relative ordering of the two schools of piety and
thus to give the decisive answer to the situation then existing within the
Church. Both sides dispatched men of the highest caliber to win over the plenum.
Cardinal König advocated integrating the texts, which de facto could only
mean assigning priority to liturgical-biblical piety. Cardinal Rufino Santos of
Manila, on the other hand, made the case for the independence of the Marian
element. Only the result of the voting—1114 to 1071—showed that the assembly was
divided into two almost equally large groups. Nevertheless, the part of the
Council Fathers shaped by the biblical and liturgical movements had won a
victory—albeit a narrow one—and thus brought about a decision whose significance
can hardly be overestimated.

Theologically
speaking, the majority spearheaded by Cardinal König was right. If the two
charismatic movements should not be seen as contrary, but must be regarded as
complementary, then an integration was imperative, even though this integration
could not mean the absorption of one movement by the other. After the Second
World War, Hugo Rahner,[4]A. Müller,[5]K. Delahaye,[6]R. Laurentin,[7]
and O. Semmelroth[8]
had convincingly demonstrated the intrinsic openness of
biblical-liturgical-patristic piety to the Marian dimension. These authors
succeeded in deepening both tendencies towards their center, in which they could
meet and thanks to which they could at the same time preserve and fruitfully
develop their distinctive character. As the facts stand, however, the Marian
chapter of Lumen Gentium was only partly successful in persuasively and
vigorously fleshing out the proposal these authors had outlined. Furthermore,
post-Conciliar developments were shaped to a large extent by a misunderstanding
of what the Council had actually said about the concept of Tradition; this
misunderstanding was given a crucial boost by the simplistic reporting of the
Conciliar debates in the media coverage. The whole debate was reduced to
Geiselmann’s question concerning the material “sufficiency” of Scripture,[9]
which in turn was interpreted in the sense of a biblicism that condemned the
whole patristic heritage to irrelevance and thereby also undermined what had
until then been the point of the liturgical movement itself. Given the situation
of the contemporary academy, however, biblicism automatically became
historicism. Admittedly, even the liturgical movement itself had not been wholly
free from historicism. Rereading its literature today, one finds that the
liturgical movement was much too influenced by an archeological mentality that
presupposed a model of decline: What occurs after a certain point in time
appears ipso facto to be of inferior value, as if the Church were not
alive and therefore capable of development in every age. The result of all of
this was that the kind of thinking shaped by the liturgical movement narrowed
into a biblicistpositivist mentality closed in a backward-looking attitude that
thus left no more room for the dynamic development of the faith. On the other
hand, the distance implied in historicism inevitably paves the way for
“modernism”; since what is merely past is no longer living, it leaves the
present isolated and so leads to self-concocted experimentation. An additional
factor was that the new, ecclesiocentric Mariology was foreign, and to a large
extent remained foreign, precisely to those Council Fathers who had been the
principal upholders of Marian piety. Nor could the vacuum thus produced be
filled out by Paul VI’s introduction of the title “Mother of the Church” at the
end of the Council, which was a conscious attempt to answer the crisis that was
already looming on the horizon. In fact, the immediate outcome of the victory of
ecclesiocentric Mariology was the collapse of Mariology altogether. It seems to
me that the changed look of the Church in Latin America after the Council, the
occasional concentration of religious feeling on political change, makes sense
when placed against the background of these events.

ARETHINKING
was set in motion above all by Paul VI’s apostolic letter Marialis Cultus
(2 February 1974) on the right form of Marian veneration. As we saw, the
decision of 1963 had led de facto to the absorption of Mariology by
ecclesiology. A reconsideration of the text has to begin with the recognition
that its actual historical effect contradicts its own original meaning. For the
chapter on Mary (VIII) was written so as to correspond intrinsically to chapters
I-IV, which describe the structure of the Church. The balance of the two was
meant to secure the correct equilibrium that would fruitfully correlate the
respective energies of the biblicalecumenical-liturgical movement and the Marian
movement. Let us put it positively: Mariology, rightly understood, clarifies and
deepens the concept of Church in two ways.

a) Contrarily to
the masculine, activistic-sociological “populus Dei” (people of God)
approach,[10]—ecclesia—is
feminine. This fact opens a dimension of mystery that points beyond sociology,
the dimension wherein the real ground and unifying power of the reality Church
first appears. Church is more than “people,” more than structure and action: The
Church contains the living mystery of maternity and of the bridal love that
makes maternity possible. There can be ecclesial piety, love for the Church,
only if this mystery exists. When the Church is no longer seen in any but a
masculine, structural, purely theoretical way, what is most authentically
ecclesial about ecclesia has been ignored—the center upon which the whole
of biblical and patristic talk about the Church actually hinges.[11]

b) Paul captures
the differentia specifica [specific difference] of the New Testament
Church with respect to the Old Testament “pilgrim people of God” in the term
“body of Christ.” Church is not an organization, but an organism of Christ. If
Church becomes a “people” at all, it is only through the mediation of
Christology. This mediation, in turn, happens in the sacraments, in the
Eucharist, which for its part presupposes the Cross and Resurrection as its
condition of possibility. Consequently, one is not talking about the Church when
one says “people of God” without at the same time saying, or at least thinking,
“Body of Christ.”[12]But even the concept of the Body of
Christ needs clarification in today’s context lest it be misunderstood: It could
easily be interpreted in the sense of a Christomonism, of an absorption of the
Church, and thus of the believing creature, into the uniqueness of Christology.
In Pauline terms, however, the claim that we are the “Body of Christ” makes
sense only against the backdrop of the formula of Genesis 2:24: “The two shall
become one flesh” (cf. 1 Cor 6:17). The Church is the body, the flesh of Christ
in the spiritual tension of love wherein the spousal mystery of Adam and Eve is
consummated, hence, in the dynamism of a unity that does not abolish dialogical
reciprocity [Gegenübersein]. By the same token, precisely the
eucharistic-christological mystery of the Church indicated in the term “Body of
Christ” remains within the proper measure only when it includes the mystery of
Mary: The mystery of the listening handmaid who—liberated in grace—speaks her
Fiat and, in so doing, becomes bride and thus body.[13]

If this is the
case, then Mariology can never simply be dissolved into an impersonal
ecclesiology. It is a thorough misunderstanding of patristic typology to reduce
Mary to a mere, hence, interchangeable, exemplification of theological
structures. Rather, the type remains true to its meaning only when the
non-interchangeable personal figure of Mary becomes transparent to the personal
form of the Church itself. In theology, it is not the person that is reducible
to the thing, but the thing to the person. A purely structural ecclesiology is
bound to degrade Church to the level of a program of action. Only the Marian
dimension secures the place of affectivity in faith and thus ensures a fully
human correspondence to the reality of the incarnate Logos. Here I see the truth
of the saying that Mary is the “vanquisher of all heresies.” This affective
rooting guarantees the bond “ex toto corde”—from the depth of the
heart—to the personal God and his Christ and rules out any recasting of
christology into a Jesus program, which can be atheistic and purely neutral: the
experience of the last few years is an astonishing contemporary verification of
the legitimate core carried in such ancient phrases.

1. PLATO:
THEPHILOSOPHER
as PSYCHOPOMP[p.15].

3. The place of
Mariology in the whole of theology

In light of what
has been said, the place of Mariology in theology also becomes clear. In his
massive tome on the history of Marian doctrine, G. Söll, summing up his
historical analysis, defends the correlation of Mariology with Christology and
soteriology against ecclesiological approaches to Marian doctrine.[14]Without diminishing the extraordinary
achievement of this work or the import of its historical findings, I take an
opposite view. In my opinion, the Council Fathers’ option for a different
approach was correct—correct from the point of view of dogmatic theology and of
larger historical considerations. Söll’s conclusions about the history of dogma
are, of course, beyond dispute: propositions about Mary first became necessary
in function of Christology and developed as part of the structure of
Christology. We must add, however, that none of the affirmations made in this
context did or could constitute an independent Mariology, but remained an
explication of Christology. By contrast, the patristic period foreshadowed the
whole of Mariology in the guise of ecclesiology, albeit without any mention of
the name of the Mother of the Lord: The virgo ecclesia [virgin Church],
the mater ecclesia [mother Church], the ecclesia immaculata
[immaculate Church], the ecclesia assumpta [assumed Church]—the whole
content of what would later become Mariology was first conceived as
ecclesiology. To be sure, ecclesiology itself cannot be isolated from
Christology. Nevertheless, the Church has a relative subsistence [Selbständigkeit]
vis-à-vis Christ, as we saw just now: the subsistence of the bride who, even
when she becomes one flesh with Christ in love, nonetheless remains an other
before him [Gegenüber].

It was not until
this initially anonymous, though personally shaped, ecclesiology fused with the
dogmatic propositions about Mary prepared in Christology that a Mariology having
an integrity of its own first emerged within theology (with Bernard of Clairvaux).
Thus, we cannot assign Mariology to Christology alone or to ecclesiology alone
(much less dissolve it into ecclesiology as a more or less superfluous
exemplification of the Church).

Rather, Mariology
underscores the “nexus mysteriorum”— the intrinsic interwovenness of the
mysteries in their irreducible mutual otherness [Gegenüber] and their
unity. While the conceptual pairs bride-bridegroom and head-body allow us to
perceive the connection between Christ and the Church, Mary represents a further
step, inasmuch as she is first related to Christ not as bride, but as mother.
Here we can see the function of the title “Mother of the Church”; it expresses
the fact that Mariology goes beyond the framework of ecclesiology and at the
same time is correlative to it.[15]

Nor, if this is
the case, can we simply argue, in discussing these correlations, that, because
Mary was first the Mother of the Lord, she is only an image of the Church. Such
an argument would be an unjustifiable simplification of the relationship between
the orders of being and knowledge. In response, one could, in fact, rightly
point to passages like Mk 3:33-35 or Lk 11:27f and ask whether, assuming this
point of departure, Mary’s physical maternity still has any theological
significance at all. We must avoid relegating Mary’s maternity to the sphere of
mere biology. But we can do so only if our reading of Scripture can legitimately
presuppose a hermeneutics that rules out just this kind of division and allows
us instead to recognize the correlation of Christ and his Mother as a
theological reality. This hermeneutics was developed in the Fathers’ personal,
albeit anonymous, ecclesiology that we mentioned just now. Its basis was
Scripture itself and the Church’s intimate experience of faith. Briefly put, the
burden of this hermeneutics is that the salvation brought about by the triune
God, the true center of all history, is “Christ and the Church”—Church here
meaning the creature’s fusion with its Lord in spousal love, in which its hope
for divinization is fulfilled by way of faith.

If, therefore,
Christ and ecclesia are the hermeneutical center of the scriptural
narration of the history of God’s saving dealings with man, then and only then
is the place fixed where Mary’s motherhood becomes theologically significant as
the ultimate personal concretization of Church. At the moment when she
pronounces her Yes, Mary is Israel in person; she is the Church in person and as
a person. She is the personal concretization of the Church because her Fiat
makes her the bodily mother of the Lord. But this biological fact is a
theological reality, because it realizes the deepest spiritual content of the
Covenant that God intended to make with Israel. Luke suggests this beautifully
in harmonizing 1:45 (“blessed is she who believed”) and 11:27 (“blessed . . .
are those who hear the word of God and keep it”). We can therefore say that the
affirmation of Mary’s motherhood and the affirmation of her representation of
the Church are related as factum and mysterium facti, as the fact
and the sense that gives the fact its meaning. The two things are inseparable:
The fact without its sense would be blind, the sense without the fact would be
empty. Mariology cannot be developed from the naked fact, but only from the fact
as it is understood in the hermeneutics of faith. In consequence, Mariology can
never be purely Mariological. Rather, it stands within the totality of the basic
Christ-Church structure and is the most concrete expression of its inner
coherence.[16]

4.
Mariology—anthropology—faith in creation

Pondering the
implications of this discussion, we see that, while Mariology expresses the
heart of “salvation history,” it nonetheless transcends an approach focused
solely on that history. Mariology is an essential component of a hermeneutics of
salvation history. Recognition of this fact brings out the true dimensions of
Christology over against a falsely understood solus Christus [Christ
alone]. Christology must speak of a Christ who is both “head and body,”
that is, who comprises the redeemed creation in its relative subsistence [Selbständigkeit].
But this move simultaneously enlarges our perspective beyond the history of
salvation, because it counters a false understanding of God’s sole agency,
highlighting the reality of the creature that God calls and enables to respond
to him freely. Mariology demonstrates that the doctrine of grace does not revoke
creation, but is the definitive Yes to creation. In this way, Mario-logy
guarantees the ontological independence [Eigenständigkeit] of creation,
undergirds faith in creation, and crowns the doctrine of creation, rightly
understood. Questions and tasks await us here that have scarcely begun to be
treated or undertaken.

a) Mary is the
believing other whom God calls. As such, she represents the creation, which is
called to respond to God, and the freedom of the creature, which does not lose
its integrity in love, but attains completion therein. Mary thus represents
saved and liberated man, but she does so precisely as a woman, that is, in the
bodily determinateness that is inseparable from man: “male and female he created
them” (Gn 1:27). The “biological” and the human are inseparable in the figure of
Mary, just as are the human and the “theological.” This insight is deeply akin
to the dominant movements of our time, yet it also contradicts them at the very
core. For while today’s anthropological program hinges more radically than ever
before on “emancipation,” the kind of freedom it seeks is one whose goal is to
“be like God” (Gn 3:5). But the idea that we can be like God implies a
detachment of man from his biological conditionedness, from the “male and female
he created them.” This sexual difference is something that man, as a biological
being, can never get rid of, something that marks man in the deepest center of
his being. Yet it is regarded as a totally irrelevant triviality, as a
constraint arising from historically fabricated “roles,” and is therefore
consigned to the “purely biological realm,” which has nothing to do with man as
such. Accordingly, this “purely biological” dimension is treated as a thing that
man can manipulate at will because it lies beyond the scope of what counts as
human and spiritual (so much so, that man can freely manipulate the coming into
being of life itself). This treatment of “biology” as a mere thing is
accordingly regarded as a liberation, for it enables man to leave Bios
behind, use it freely, and to be completely independent of it in every other
respect, that is, to be simply a “human being” who is neither male nor female.
But in reality man thereby strikes a blow against his deepest being. He holds
himself in contempt, because the truth is that he is human only insofar as he is
bodily, only insofar as he is man or woman. When man reduces this fundamental
determination of his being to a despicable trifle that can be treated as a
thing, he himself becomes a trifle and a thing, and his “liberation” turns out
to be his degradation to an object of production. Whenever biology is subtracted
from humanity, humanity itself is negated. Thus, the question of the legitimacy
of maleness as such and of femaleness as such has high stakes: Nothing less than
the reality of the creature. Since the biological determinateness of humanity is
least possible to hide in motherhood, an emancipation that negates Bios
is a particular aggression against the woman. It is the denial of her right to
be a woman. Conversely, the preservation of creation is just so far bound up in
a special way with the question of woman. And the Woman in whom “biology” is
“theology”—that is, motherhood of God—is in a special way the point where paths
diverge.

b) Mary’s
virginity, no less than her maternity, confirms that the “biological” is human,
that the whole man stands before God, and that the fact of being human only as
male and female is included in faith’s eschatological demand and its
eschatological hope. It is no accident that virginity—although as a form of life
it is also possible, and intended for, the man—is first patterned on the woman,
the true keeper of the seal of creation, and has its normative, plenary
form—which the man can, so to say, only imitate—in her.[17]

The connections we
have just outlined finally enable us to explain the structure of Marian piety.
Its traditional place in the Church’s liturgy is Advent and then, in general,
the feasts relating to the Christmas cycle: Candlemas and the Annunciation.[18]

In our
considerations so far, we have regarded the Marian dimension as having three
characteristics. First, it is personalizing (the Church not as a structure, but
as a person and in person). Second, it is incarnational (the unity of bios,
person, and relation to God; the ontological freedom of the creature vis-à-vis
the Creator and of the “body” of Christ relative to the head). These two
characteristics give the Marian dimension a third: It involves the heart,
affectivity, and thus fixes faith solidly in the deepest roots of man’s being.
These characteristics suggest Advent as the liturgical place of the Marian
dimension, while their meaning in turn receives further illumination from
Advent. Marian piety is Advent piety; it is filled with the joy of the
expectation of the Lord’s imminent coming; it is ordered to the incarnational
reality of the Lord’s nearness as it is given and gives itself. Ulrich Wickert
says very nicely that Luke depicts Mary as twice heralding Advent—at the
beginning of the Gospel, when she awaits the birth of her Son, and at the
beginning of Acts, when she awaits the birth of the Church.[19]

However, in the
course of history an additional element became more and more pronounced. Marian
piety is, to be sure, primarily incarnational and focused on the Lord who has
come. It tries to learn with Mary to stay in his presence. But the feast of
Mary’s Assumption into heaven, which gained in significance thanks to the dogma
of 1950, accentuates the eschatological transcendence of the Incarnation. Mary’s
path includes the experience of rejection (Mk 3:31-35; Jn 2:4). When she is
given away under the Cross (Jn 19:26), this experience becomes a participation
in the rejection that Jesus himself had to endure on the Mount of Olives (Mk
14:34) and on the Cross (Mk 15:34). Only in this rejection can the new come to
pass; only in a going away can the true coming take place (Jn 16:7). Marian
piety is thus necessarily a passion-centered piety. In the prophecy of the aged
Simeon, who foretold that a sword would pierce Mary’s heart (Lk 2:35), Luke
interweaves from the very outset the Incarnation and the Passion, the joyful and
the sorrowful mysteries. In the Church’s piety, Mary appears, so to say, as the
living Veronica’s veil, as an icon of Christ that brings him into the presence
of man’s heart, translates Christ’s image into the heart’s vision, and thus
makes it intelligible. Looking towards the Mater assumpta, the virgin
mother assumed into heaven, Advent broadens into eschatology. In this sense, the
medieval expansion of Marian piety beyond Advent into the whole ensemble of the
mysteries of salvation is entirely in keeping with the logic of biblical faith.

We can, in
conclusion, derive from the foregoing a threefold task for education in Marian
piety:

a) It is necessary
to maintain the distinctiveness of Marian devotion precisely by keeping its
practice constantly and strictly bound to Christology. In this way, both will be
brought to their proper form.

b) Marian piety
must not collapse into partial aspects of the Christian mystery, let alone
reduce that mystery to partial aspects of itself. It must be open to the whole
breadth of the mystery and become itself a means to this breadth.

c) Marian piety
will always stand within the tension between theological rationality and
believing affectivity. This is part of its essence, and its task is not to allow
either to atrophy. Affectivity must not lead it to forget the sober measure of
ratio, nor must the sobriety of a reasonable faith allow it to suffocate
the heart, which often sees more than naked reason. It was not for nothing that
the Fathers understood Mt 5:8 as the center of their theological epistemology:
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” The organ for seeing
God is the purified heart. It may just be the task of Marian piety to awaken the
heart and purify it in faith. If the misery of contemporary man is his
increasing disintegration into mere bios and mere rationality,
Marian piety could work against this “decomposition” and help man to rediscover
unity in the center, from the heart.—

Translated by
Adrian Walker.

JOSEPH
CARDINAL RATZINGER is Prefect
of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

[2]Typical of the contrast between the two
attitudes, which extends far beyond the domain of Mariology, are the
questions posed in J. A. Jungmann’s book, Die Frohbotschaft
und die Glaubensverkündigung (Regensburg,
1936); the passionate reaction to this work, which at that time had to
be withdrawn from the market, likewise sheds a very clear light on the
situation. Cf. the remarks on this episode penned
by Jungmann in 1961, in J. A. Jungmann. Ein Leben für
Liturgie und Kerygma, ed. B. Fischer—H.B. Meyer (Innsbruck,
1975), 12–18.

[3]Cf. the magisterial presentation of R.
Laurentin, La question mariale (Paris,
1963). Significant, for example, is Pope John XXIII’s warning against
certain practices or excessive special forms of piety, even of
veneration of the Madonna (19). Such forms of piety “sometimes give a
pitiful idea of the piety of our good people.” In the concluding
allocution of the Roman Synod, the Pope repeated his warning against the
sort of piety that gives the imagination free rein and contributes
little to the concentration of the soul. “We wish to invite you to
adhere to the more ancient and simpler practices of the Church.”

[9]I have tried to show that in reality
Geiselmann’s formulation of the question misses the core of the problem
in: K. Rahner—J. Ratzinger, Offenbarung und
Überlieferung (Freiburg, 1965), 25–69; see also my commentary
on Chapter 2 of Dei Verbum in LthK,
Supplementary Volume II, 515–528.

[10][In what follows, Ratzinger uses the word
“Kirche,” Church, without the definite article. The reader should bear
in mind that he is talking about “Church” in its personal, Marian
reality–Tr.]

[17]On the unity of the biological, the human,
and the theological, see I. de la Potterie, “La mère de Jésus et la
conception virginale du Fils de Dieu,” 89f. On the whole discussion, see
also L. Bouyer, Frau und Kirche (Einsiedeln, 1977). This is also
the place to mention a lovely observation in A. Luciani’s Ihr
ergebener (Munich, 1978), 126. Luciani recounts a meeting with
schoolgirls who objected to the alleged discrimination against women in
the Church. In response, Luciani brings into relief the fact that Christ
had a human mother, but did not and could not have a human father: the
perfecting of the creature as creature occurs in the woman, not in the
man.

[18]The new missal—in conformity with the
ancient Tradition—sees these two feasts as feasts of Christ.
Notwithstanding this change, the feasts by no means lose their Marian
content.